1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sheet feed device applicable to a recorder such as an ink jet printer, a thermal printer or a facsimile machine. The sheet may include a record sheet or a thin plastic sheet on which an image is recorded, and also a document sheet which bears information to be recorded.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a recorder such as a printer or facsimile machine, platen means which backs up a sheet for a print head and sheet feed means for feeding sheets at a predetermined pitch are required.
To this end, a platen roller (feed roller) having a circular cross-section has been used. The platen roller functions as both platen means and paper feed means and is simple in structure. However, since the platen roller forms a record plane around the roller, the roller diameter must be large in order to assure a flat record plane. When the roller diameter is small relative to and record width, and high print quality is difficult to attain.
In order to resolve the above problem, the sheet may be fed by two parallelly arranged rollers to form a flat record plane between the two rollers. However, since this arrangement uses two rollers, a large space is required and cost increases result.